Ailes, Murdoch and Nazis

Roger Ailes has offered his apology to NPR...wait, scratch that. Ailes called NPR executives Nazis. But it wasn't they to whom he said he was sorry. He did that to Abe Foxman, head of the ADL. From Marc Tracy in The Tablet, and note his very droll and hilarious last line:

It doesn't matter that Fox News head Roger Ailes called NPR "Nazis." Why? Because he apologized to Abraham Foxman! Per a press release we got:

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has accepted an apology from Roger Ailes, Chairman and CEO of Fox News Channel, for his use of the expression "Nazi attitudes" in an interview to describe officials at National Public Radio.

In a letter to Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, Mr. Ailes wrote that he was sorry for using the term "Nazi" in an interview with The Daily Beast. "I was of course ad-libbing and should not have chosen that word," he wrote, "but I was angry at the time because of NPR's willingness to censor Juan Williams for not being liberal enough."

(Actually, not to nit-pick, but Ailes did more than "use the expression 'Nazi attitudes'"—he actually said of NPR, "They are, of course, Nazis.")

My parents used to tell me that when you apologize but add a "but," you are basically negating the apology. Oh well: "I welcome Roger Ailes's apology, which is as sincere as it is heartfelt," Foxman said. (As it happens, I too believe that Ailes's apology was exactly as sincere as it was heartfelt.)

It once would have been thought kind of amazing that the president of a news organization would call anyone "Nazis." except, you know, for Nazis.

You can disagree with what NPR did and think their execs intolerant without getting into Nazis. But we're in a situation with today's right in which this kind of inflammatory rhetoric is not only winkingly tolerated; it is veritably demanded by the base.

And I'm sorry, but it's not the same on the left. There are plenty of examples, true, and I'm sure our conservative friends will dig them out. But it's not qualitatively the same.

Earlier this year Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos) published his book American Taliban. It was more attacked than defended in the liberal blogosphere, to my reading, by people (like Yglesias here) who wrote that a literal comparison like that was way over the top. Even Moulitsas' defenders, like Digby, acknowledged that there was no literal comparison.

On the right, allegedly serious people say: no, it's quite literal. Liberalism is fascism. Liberals are Nazis. Not Zyklon B Nazis, they will pleasantly allow; but Nazis in the indoctrination and propaganda and reich-uber-Gott sense.

The core reality of today's right is that rhetoric drives substance. The first order of action on the right, learned from Limbaugh and Beck and so on, is rhetoric. The more extreme the better. The more it offends liberal sensibilities the better. The more it outrages the better.

And when you take rhetorical positions like that - liberalism is fascism, government is evil, Islam is a danger and a hoax, and so on - you define the substantive parameters that can permissibly follow that rhetoric. Because you can't compromise with fascism and evil and dangerous hoaxes. That is impossible. You can only crush them. So you oppose everything, and amp up the rhetoric even more, and the cycle continues.

Calling Obama a Nazi has already been made normal. I read a couple of days ago how many times Glenn Beck has used words like "Nazis" and "Hitler" and "communism" and "fascism" in the last two years. I can't find the link now, but it was a lot; enough that if you added them up and made a rough calculation of the number of shows he's done in that time, that it's an everyday thing for him. He's the highest profile, but he's not alone. All over the country on the AM radio dial, his imitators and wannabees are doing the same thing.

Does anyone care about this? Does the ADL care about this? A group allegedly dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry in all their forms? Oh, yes, the ADL cares. They gave Rupert Murdoch an award last month.

Ben Adler of Newsweek writes that the ADL should revoke the award. That would be a courageous thing. It's obviously not going to happen. I'd like to say here that someone, some prominent Republican, needs to stand up to this and call it out, but it wouldn't do any good. Whoever did that would simply be accused of being a quisling, and the cycle would start up again, reinforcing itself in its thrashing little eddies of acrimony.